Using post-colonial theory, we sought to determine what current falls prevention recommendations are offered by local falls prevention programmers (LFPPs) to reduce fall rates among Inuvialuit Elders in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada, and to understand how falls prevention programs for Inuvialuit Elders can be co-created with participants to be culturally safe. The findings showed that Inuvialuit Elders and LFPPs in Inuvik recommend adding environment assessments and modifications, physical activity, and education for Elders and caregivers to existing programs. They also felt that for culturally safe falls prevention programs to occur, LFPPs must include the following strategies: establishing trust and rapport within the community, including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interventions in falls prevention programs, and training others on cultural safety practices.

The focus of this article is understanding the perceptions that Canadian Indigenous teachers and students have on a novel physical activity teaching method that is utilised in the classroom. We explore the role that physical activity plays in the healthy growth and development of children, with special attention to Indigenous children. Through participatory action research and qualitative methods, Indigenous teachers and students share their thoughts on physical activity in the classroom and the barriers and facilitators that exist to implementing classroom physical activity. This work is discussed in the context of the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and provides the reader with tangible suggestions for movement integration in the classroom.

Alongside associated forms of socially and politically conscious food production, community food growing is routinely connected to a wide range of social and environmental benefits. However, robust evidence in support of these associations remains scant, and while the conversation has shifted in recent years to take account of the sometimes unintended or negative aspects of these activities, no consensus has been reached about how such forms of food growing should adapt to new conditions, or be scaled up to maximize their positive impacts. A July 2016 conference was organized to address this strategic shortfall. This themed issue presents the papers resulting from the conference.

This article describes our qualitative research on the follow-up of 10 children, 5 years into recovery after cardiac surgery. The research was driven by a multi-disciplinary team of medical anthropologists, cardiologists, and an intensive care specialist and was based at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital where they underwent surgeries. The research sought to answer two questions; first, could we successfully maintain contact with and follow up the children; the second – which will be answered in future papers – asked what life was like for them and their families during surgery and later recovery. The results are presented as a discussion on the themes that arose in our engagement and analysis and not as clinical evidence. These showed that elective surgery although significantly delayed was successful, and all children were followed up at their medical appointments. The researchers, however, were unable to establish follow-up with all families over the duration of the study. In the final round of interviews in the respondents’ homes, of 10 children, we remained in contact with seven. The discussion argues that effective communication and access to these children was often compromised by their coming from the poorer communities in the Cape Town metropolitan region, making them even more vulnerable during their recovery periods.

Transitional justice seeks to address legacies of violence around political transition from authoritarianism and armed conflict. It does so in ways driven by a global discourse that is prescriptive and often remote from the contexts in which it is articulated and the populations it claims to serve. Transitional justice is also embedded in teleological liberal approaches to transition, with a perceived endpoint of liberal democracy. Critical approaches to transitional justice have used qualitative methodologies to understand the agendas of those—notably victims of violence—that transitional justice foregrounds, and to demonstrate that transitional justice mechanisms often serve elite agendas, while minimizing the agency of socially excluded populations. An alternative, minimally explored route to victim engagement with such processes has been the mobilization of victims and victim organizations, an emancipatory approach that seeks to provide a space for victims to engage in transitional justice debates on their own terms. Here, a research engagement with a victims’ organization through a Participatory Action Research modality is described in which researchers support victim engagement in peer research to catalyze a social movement of victims in post-conflict Nepal.

Concerns over low uptake of cervical screening among minority ethnic women have spurred much research and practical activity to address the problem. Due to theoretical and methodological difficulties, research in this area has tended to focus on the communication deficit of women, without addressing the social context. This has not only hindered a wider theoretical understanding of the problem but, also, has perpetuated ineffective health promotion practice in this area. Using a participatory action research (PAR) approach, the project ‘Woman-to-woman: promoting cervical screening to minority ethnic women in primary care’, tackled the problem by involving both health professionals and women from the communities. Working in partnership, both professional and lay participants identified the problems from their own perspectives and generated solutions to resolve them. An intervention strategy was formulated in which bilingual women from the communities were recruited as community health educators to provide an informed link between their respective communities and the primary care sector. The outcomes of the intervention were evaluated by all participants. This paper aims to introduce PAR as an alternative approach by presenting an overview of the study. It begins by highlighting some of the common theoretical and methodological problems encountered by researchers; and then introduces the research framework of PAR and describes the research processes. A case observation is presented to illustrate the depth of understanding of the screening processes that can be obtained using this approach. The project has demonstrated that applying PAR cannot only lead to meaningful discoveries and insights into the problem of minority ethnic women and cervical screening, but also change in health promotion practice, which would have been difficult to achieve using a conventional research model. However, this study has also revealed major limitations of PAR, which need to be addressed if the approach is to be further developed.